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Why "We The People" Should Use Random Sample Voting
With a little boost from 4chan, a petition for the U.S. government to build a working Death Star has reached 30,000 signatures and counting, over on the White House's Department Of Let's See How Fast We Can Get 75,000 Signatures To Legalize Pot (or as it's officially known, "We The People"). This is the website where any of the member of the public can create a petition that other users can sign, and if the petition receives 25,000 signatures in 30 days, the White House will issue an official response. (Alan Boyle is taking suggestions on how the White House should respond to the Death Star request. How about: "4chan. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.")
Cynics will say that the whole process was already a joke anyway. Even looking at the most popular non-Death-Star related petitions on We The People, most of them express standard left- or right-wing positions on hot-button topics in a manner that's extremely unlikely to convert anyone who doesn't already agree. Since everyone already knows that those some large segment of the population holds those positions, nobody would be surprised that any one of those petitions would be able to gather 25,000 signatures, and so there would be no pressure on the White House to change any of their official positions as a result.
On the other hand, I don't think this means that online petitioning can't work. Rather, I think a sligthly different algorithm could greatly improve the quality of the suggestions that get filtered to the top and trigger a response from the White House. At least one algorithm exists that (a) would prevent the system from being "gamed" by any large, organized group (whether 4chan or the NRA); and (b) would reward the petitions that were supported by the highest percentage of the general user population (or, if you prefer, the petitions that were supported by the highest percentage of credentialed experts in a given field).
The algorithm is the same one that I've advocated for preventing cheating on digg, or identifying the best "hidden gems" among newly released songs (and political arguments), or adjudicating Facebook abuse complaints -- have each petition voted on by a random subset of users registered on the We The People site. Based on this random sampling method, the petitions that have the highest percentage of "yes" votes, are assumed to be the ones with the broadest level of support among registered users, and the ones most deserving of a response from the White House.
Example: Suppose there are 250,000 registered users on the We The People site. A user creates a new petition, and somehow manages to pass some "threshold" that is implemented to screen out blatant time-wasters. (Perhaps you have to gain 100 signatures to pass the first threshold. I'd prefer it if you could clear the first hurdle just by paying $5 with a credit card, but this might anger purists who say that petitioning the government should always be free.) Your petition then gets emailed out to 100 randomly selected other users on the site, who vote to either Agree or Disagree. (In practice, in order to get 100 votes cast, you'd have to email more than 100 people, taking into account their response rate. So if only 50% of users respond to an email request for votes, email it to 200 randomly selected users to ensure you get about 100 votes cast.) Then petitions are sorted according to the percentage of users in their sample who voted to Agree. Petitions that got a high percentage of yes-votes, could be forwarded out to a wider audience (say, 1,000 users), to ensure that the initial high percentages of yes-votes wasn't just a fluke. Users in each random sample could also include comments about why they were voting a particular proposal up or down.
This sounds deceptively simple, but it makes it much harder for an organized online movement to hack the system. Say that 4chan manages to get 25,000 registered users in an attempt to push their favored petition to the top. This still means that, on average, their voters will comprise only about 10% of the randomly selected voters in any online poll - possibly enough to give an extra boost to a petition that already had broad support from regular users, but not enough to achieve a coup all by themselves.
Perhaps you'd object that even if such a system could not be manipulated by organized mobs, it would still leave the approval rating in the hands of non-expert ordinary citizens (even if citizens registered on We The People are slightly more informed than average). Whether you think this is a good thing, depends on whether you think the purpose of the site is to reflect the will of the people, or to provide informed advice to the President.
But if you want to get a random sampling of expert opinions, that's pretty easy as well. For petitions on, say, economic matters, just have a subset of users consisting of economics professors from accredited universities across the country. (These credentials would have to be confirmed manually by White House staff, but it's not that hard to verify that someone owns an .edu address and that their university webpage identifies them as an econ professor.) Then any petition on an economic matter could be submitted to a random sample of economics professors to be rated by them. If a petition gets a rating from economics experts that is wildly different from the rating it gets from the general user population, that suggests something interesting is going on (either econ professors are out of touch, or the general public is misinformed). But if a petition gets high levels of support from the public and the relevant expert group, that would seem to justify a response from the White House, much more so than some of the idiotic petitions currently pulling 65,000+ votes on We The People.
Something almost like this has actually been done by the IGM Economic Experts Panel in Chicago, which surveyed a group of 41 economists that the IGM believed to be among the best in the world, representative of the political left, right, and center. The survey found a high degree of consensus on questions that the general public is divided on, such as the fact that 40 out of 41 experts agreed with the statement:
All else equal, permanently raising the federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income by 1 percentage point for those in the top (i.e., currently 35%) tax bracket would increase federal tax revenue over the next 10 years.
To people who have heard celebrity conservative economists claiming that raising marginal tax rates lowers tax revenue, it might come as a surprise that virtually all expert economists in the IGM's sample, including a representative number of self-described conservatives, agreed that it does not. But don't just soak the rich and call it a day; most economists in the IGM's sample also disagreed that:
The cumulative budget shortfalls in the US over the next 10 years can be reduced by half (or more) purely by increasing the federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income for those in the top tax bracket.
Of course those were questions of fact (what economists call positive economics), while petitions address questions of what should be done (what economists call normative economics, and which varies according to your values and goals). But even economists with diverse political leanings often advocate similar policies; NPR interviewed 5 economists spanning the spectrum from left to right, and found across-the-board consensus in favor of 6 proposals, which you can read here. And hey, one of them is legalizing pot!
If We The People implements a system for polling a random sample of economics experts, I think their first order of business should be to have them rate the ideas in that 6-point platform. The five-person panel claimed that all of these ideas have broad support from economists across the political spectrum, but it would be good to know for sure. And for any of those six points that has broad consensus support from experts, it should be incumbent on the White House to declare whether they agree, and if not, why not.
More generally, random-sample voting will always reveal more useful information -- whether about the opinion of the public, or about the opinions of experts -- than a petition site that lets passionate users self-organize into signature mobs. As I've been saying ever since my first story advocating this algorithm, the only site I'm aware of that currently implements random-sample voting correctly, is HotOrNot, which shows users a random series of pictures and lets users rate the picture's hotness on a scale of 1 to 10. Can we not make at least that much effort to design a working system, when it comes to deciding which petitions get a response from the White House?
This makes the erroneous assumption that only those things are worthy of attention of government that a large percentage of the public agrees with. That is a disturbing view of how government should work.
If 25000 people bother to petition the White House about some issue, the president's staff should damned well pay attention and consider it. It doesn't matter whether any of the other 330 million people in the country approve or not. And if the president needs to make economic decisions by conducting unbiased polls of academic economists, he is obviously not up to his job and should resign.
Far from fringe ideas are being ignored already. Anything that does not agree with the current political line gets a BS answer. They had the guy who runs the TSA reply to a petition asking for it to be disbanded or scaled back. I think that pretty much says it all.
No matter how you count votes or check for support they will ignore it.
We should make bribery illegal (instead of necessary).
So, start a White House petition on the subject. Not that it would get very far. The whole idea of campaign contributions as speech is based upon a court interpretation of the Constitution. As such, it would require an amendment to separate the concept of slipping someone a few bucks from that of petitioning the government for a redress of grievances.
Of course the Republican party would oppose it,
I wouldn't worry too much about them. Its one thing to take money in exchange for political favors under the table. At least the ethics violations are deniable when the investigations get started. But to actually sign a pledge, essentially leaving a written record of their intent as evidence, is the zenith of stupidity. They'll be pretty easy to deal with.
Of course the Republican party would oppose it
Exactly! Unlike Democrats, who would never, ever, accept money from Hollywood studi... er, wait.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
So, what you're saying, is there needs to be a Death Star dedicated to blasting lobbyists and lawyers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's as if a million porkbarrels cried out and were suddenly silenced.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We can improve it even more by allowing the points to be positive or negative, and classifying these into categories, like "informative" "insightful" or "flame" or "troll".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The death star petition is the absolute most serious petition of them all!
Right! What was it that Bush said? Something like,
"We must take this fight to Alderaan, before they bring the fight to us!"
Damn bun-heads, always jealous of our Earthican awesomeness....
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
As I've been saying ever since my first story [in 2008] advocating this algorithm, the only site I'm aware of that currently implements random-sample voting correctly, is HotOrNot
It's understandable why you may have failed to consider this notion, but perhaps the reason that, in 4 years, the only group to take you seriously has been an idiotic vanity website is because it's a stupid fucking idea.
It worked for Zuckerberg. Remember that scene in The Social Network where he has a "who's hotter" site? He needs the formula for the algorithm that turns those decisions into an ordered ranking. (That's how chess rankings are computed. It means more to beat a high-rated opponent than a low-rated one.)
But what this article proposes is more like a human-powered spam filter. Or like ReCaptcha, which. underneath, is a random-sample voting system used to assist OCR systems that are processing scanned books. (It was a good idea originally, but now OCR is so good that when something gets kicked out for human processing, it probably isn't a valid word.)
Yeah, who wants to periodically show up to a government-approved site to cast a vote on how the country should be run? That's not how democracy works!
Everything is better with chainsaws.
The whole idea of campaign contributions as speech is based upon a court interpretation of the Constitution. As such, it would require an amendment to separate the concept of slipping someone a few bucks from that of petitioning the government for a redress of grievances.
I thought the non-strawman version of the issue was "is it protected speech for me to use my $1million to advertise for $_politicalfigure." Not quite the same as "slipping someone a few bucks", which is commonly known as bribery and is already illegal.
As skeptical as I am about the effectiveness of the US government, I do think the White House staffers who set up We the People understand the democratic process a hell of a lot better than Bennett does.
The presence of a silly Death Star petition doesn't worry me. What worries me is the ability of well-organized groups to introduce severe sampling bias to the system Bennett proposes.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
> We should make bribery illegal (instead of necessary).
Gonna take that and run as fast as I can off topic....
I heard some great comments about why bribery should be half legal. Specifically, it should be perfectly legal to offer bribes, pay bribes etc. However, it should be highly illegal to accept a bribe.
Why? Quite simple, it messes up the power balance.
Think of it this way, Alice wants to bribe Bob today. Either Alice officers, or Bob solicits the bribe, they may use very vague language, or other techniques to conceal their intents, and that may help them get away with it....but get away with it is the operative term since they are BOTH breaking the law. If either of them admits the truth, they can BOTH go to jail (or at least be prosecuted and end up with a criminal record... which has more long lasting downsides than the jail time).
On the other hand, lets say it becomes legal for Alice, and the penalty for Bob doesn't change. Now Alice wants to bribe Bob still...but if either of them talks, only Bob goes to jail. Bob, the man with the power, the guy who can choose to take the bribe and act in a corrupt manner or reject it, he is the one taking the risk, and taking it alone.
The problem is not just now but later. In the first scenario, Bob and Alice are conspirators from the moment the bribery starts, into the future. They each have mutually assured destruction, and only need to worry if one of them otherwise fell under the eye of the law and might use it as a bargaining chip.... but unless that happens, neither need worry too much.
In their next meeting, they can do it all over again....same deal.
In the second scenario, Alice may get what she wants sure.... but.... she has what she wanted. Her and Bob are no longer conspirators. In their next meeting, Bob can do it all over again, but Alice now has power over Bob. If Bob doesn't give her what she wants, all she has to do is drop a dime on him. Each transaction gives her more and more power over him, and digs him deeper and deeper into his relationship with his future bunk mate.
So end result? Bob would have to be exceptionally stupid to accept even the first bribe.
It may leave Alice getting off scott free for her behaviour, if it happens, but.... I wager (and it is the claim of those who advocate this) that it prevents more bribes than it lets Alices get off.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
OK, here it is: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/overhaul-petition-process/JggZYLmL
Short URL : http://wh.gov/Uyrx
A fun fact for today: the "fiscal cliff" bill passed the other day includes a tax break for Hollywood movies and TV shows, $20 million per episode or per movie. Despite the fact that 2012 was the best ever year for movies
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
This is an issue only because Congress does not increase the number of Representatives, which is within its power.
It'd be a fake improvement. 'N' people would elect one representative, but then that representative own vote would be worth less and less in both absolute and relative terms as the representative population increases following the increase in the general voting population.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.